The RSS footer plugin adds a credit link to each post in your RSS feed so that when the automated scrapers come knocking they inadvertently post a link back to your original post. Until now.

A few days ago I made a post about the Top Affiliate Challenge show we are working on. Within minutes, a scraper MFA blog had nabbed my content and re-posted it.

The funny thing was that the blog REMOVED the RSS Footer link from the beginning of the post, leaving a single period behind. The even funnier thing as that despite all of that work, they GAVE me credit at the end of the post for the content.

When I first started using the plugin I noticed that most scrapers disable any links in the content they steal when they steal it. I was getting track-backs from other blogs that had my custom RSS Footer text at the beginning, but no link.

Now it appears they have gone a step further and are removing the text all together.

Scrapers will always be around, and I guess as long as they give credit for my work I can’t complain too loudly. It is still frustrating though when you write a super-star post and Google points to your blog as duplicate content.

I noticed a significant increase in scraping activity when i signed on with Feedburner. I wonder how many of my RSS subscribers are scrapers?

Hmm indeed, nothing much to be done about that… Do they strip other outbound links too? If not, you could consider 301 redirecting another domain, and replacing your domain name with that domain name in the output of your feed, which, coincidentally, is something i’m planning on implementing in a plugin 🙂

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